Getting Rid of Your Car Could Save You $10,000 Every Year

Imagine all of the things you could buy, the bills you could pay and the vacations you could take with an extra $10,000 in your pocket every year. According to a report from the American Public Transportation Association, that’s how much you could save if you ditched your car and turned to public transit instead. The average savings clocked in at an impressive $848 a month – that’s $10,181 a year – but in some cities that number climbed even higher. New York, the city with the most savings, averaged a whopping $15,041 every year.

The report looked at the costs of owning a car – including new tires, oil changes and other maintenance, gas, parking, licensing, depreciation and financing to determine just how much you could save. That number was then subtracted from the cost of a monthly public transportation pass. The study examined 20 cities in the US including Las Vegas, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Honolulu and New York. Of those cities, only two got below $800 in savings a month: Las Vegas and Dallas.

The report assumed that the average car gets 23.1 mpg, drives 15,000 miles and pays $3.65 a gallon for gas, so the numbers could vary, particularly if you have an expensive car or live in an area with higher gas prices. If you want to figure out your own particular savings, you can use the calculator from Public Transportation and watch your cash flow grow. Add to that the amount of emissions that you could eliminate every year, and ditching the car looks even better.

5 thoughts on “Getting Rid of Your Car Could Save You $10,000 Every Year”

A car hits your bike. You're dead or seriously injured. I've gotten into many auto accidents, where one time my car flipped over and I just walked away with a headache, backache.
If public transit were efficient then it would be better. But in NY/NJ area nj transit is $300 monthly pass for 30 mile train ride, then you have to pay mta ny subway about $100 a month. So its $400 a month. Its all run by the unions, so it will keep going up faster than inflation. If you're in the suburbs you need a car to do grocery shopping, errands etc. If you live in the city New york, you don't need it, but everything is expensive, rent, groceries, taxis etc.

I drive an older car, and my yearly costs vary from about $6000-8000 depending largely on repairs. This is a cost including gas, oil, maintenance, insurance, bridge tolls, and of course repairs. If I switched to public transportation, my yearly cost for commuting to work alone would be $4810. The downside is that it would add 3+ hours to my commute everyday. Also, I would have no way to go any of the places I do on weekends.
The worst of it is, that public transportation cost is only for me. I commute with my wife and drop her off nearby my work, so if we both had to use public transportation, our yearly cost would be $9620 - and that still wouldn't be going anywhere on weekends (as well as each of us loosing over 780 hours a year, when we are already desperately short on time).
The car, for many people, is a far superior choice. You don't have to get the latest, fanciest car. Get something old, and take good care of it. Better for you, and better for the environment than manufacturing a new car.

I'm ABSOLUTLY AGREE with Tuckerfan's comment. When the massive transportation works bettter and be a REAL solution and advantage over the car, people of course will prefer to use it to save MONEY and the most important: TIME!!

Yeah, I'm just going to say that this HUGELY dependent upon a number of factors. For example, where I live, it costs me $60/week to use mass transit, and back when I had a piece of crap 1992 Mercury Grand Marquis, I was spending $60/week in gas, and I had a MUCH shorter commute. I now spend between 2-4 hours a DAY in traffic and/or waiting for the bus, while when I was driving I was spending 1.5 hours a day in traffic.
If mass transit was actually saving me money, I could afford to buy a decent car. If it was saving me time, I could work a second job so that I could save up money to buy a decent car. Since it does neither, I'm stuck in the hell of Catch-22. Can't stop taking mass transit, because I can't afford a car, can't get a second job (or a better paying job) because I'm taking mass transit.